David is an Associate Artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company and a Member of the Fight Directors Association of Great Britain.

THEATRE

The Price (West End; nominated for Best Actor Olivier Award) Pinter Season – The Collection (West End), The Importance Of Being Earnest (Vaudeville Theatre), The Last Confession (World Tour), Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Apollo Theatre), All My Sons (Apollo Theatre), Complicit (The Old Vic), The Last Confession (West End and Chichester Festival Theatre), Once in A Lifetime (Royal National Theatre), Man and Boy (West End and No. 1 Tour), The Play What I Wrote (West End), Amadeus (West End, London andBroadway), Saturday, Sunday, Monday (Chichester Festival Theatre), George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Aldwych Theatre; won Critic’s Circle Award, nominated for Best Actor Evening Standard and Olivier Awards), What a Performance (Plymouth Theatre Royal and Queens Theatre), Oleanna (Royal Court and Duke of York’s Theatre; Best Actor, Royal Variety Club), Timon of Athens (Young Vic; Best Actor, Evening Standard Awards) and Separation (Hampstead Theatre and Comedy Theatre; Olivier nomination for Best Actor). David has also acted extensively in the Regional Theatres including Liverpool, Birmingham, Chester, Exeter, Edinburgh Festival, Chichester Festival. An Associate Artist of The Royal Shakespeare Company he has played Iago in Othello, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, Caliban in The Tempest, Bolingbroke in Richard II, Angelo in Measure for Measure (all nominated for Best Actor Olivier Awards).

FILM

American Assassin, Effie, The Bank Job , Act of God, Foolproof, The In-Laws, Live From Baghdad, Sabotage, Wing Commander, A Perfect Murder, Sunday, Deadly Voyage, Executive Decision, The Lucona Affair, Big Foot and the Hendersons, When the Whales Came, Iron Eagle, Gulag, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Song for Europe (Channel 4 – Best Actor Award, RTS Awards), Falcon and the Snowman, The Last Innocent Man (HBO – Best Actor, Ace Awards), Red Monarch (Channel 4 – Best Actor Award, Marseilles Film Festival) and A World Apart (Working Title – Best Actor Nomination, BAFTA).

 

TELEVISION

His Dark Materials (BBC One), Press (BBC One), Capitaine Marleau and Sang et Lumiere (Canal+), Urban Myths: The Dali & The Cooper (Sky Arts), Peter Pan Goes Wrong (BBC), Doctor Who (BBC), Decline & Fall (BBC), Agatha Christie’s Poirot (ITV Productions), Great Expectations (BBC 2), Richard II (BBC 2), Hidden (Origin Pictures/BBC One), Going Postal (Sky), Agatha Christie’s Poirot (ITV Productions), Diverted (TV film Shaftesbury Films/Big Tree Productions), Agatha Christie’s Poirot (ITV Productions), Maxwell (BBC TV), Dracula (BBC TV), Flood (Power), Agatha Christie’s Poirot (Granada TV/A & E Television Networks), A Bear Named Winnie (Powercorp Prods.), Agatha Christie’s Poirot (Granada TV/A & E Television Networks), Henry VIII (Granada TV), George Carmen QC (BBC), NCS: The Series (BBC), The Way We Live Now (BBC), Murder In Mind – ‘Teacher’ (BBC), NCS: Manhunt (BBC), Victoria & Albert (BBC & A& E), Agatha Christie’s Poirot (Carnival Films in association with A&E Television Networks), RKO281 (HBO), Seesaw (LWT),Solomon (Lux & TNT USA), Moses (Lux & TNT USA), Secret Agent (BBC), Agatha Christie’s Poirot (LWT – Best Actor nomination, BAFTA), Separation (BBC), Bingo (BBC), Once in a Lifetime (BBC), Cause Celebre (Anglia), Ulysses (LWT), Playing Shakespeare (LWT), Blott on the Landscape (BBC – Best Actor, BAFTA), The Life of Freud (BBC – Best Actor, RTS Awards) and The Muse (BBC).

RADIO

The Kreutzer Sonata (Best Actor Award), Never Been Kissed in the Same Place Twice, Ironhand, First Night Impressions, The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, Debussy, Gorky on Tolstoy/Gorky on Chekhov, Wilkie Collins – Rich Pickings, The Shout, Rosenberg in the Trenches, Life of Chekhov and most recently the composer William Byrde in To Preserve the Health of Man (BBC Radio 3).

He was created a Knight Bachelor in the Queen’s 2020 Birthday Honours List, for services to Drama and Charity.

Geoffrey Wansell is an award-winning author, broadcaster and journalist.

Together with David Suchet, he wrote the best-selling book Poirot and Me in 2013, which has been published around the world.

They met on the set of the 20^th Century Fox film, When the Whales Came, based on a Michael Morpurgo story, in which he served as executive producer and David appeared alongside Paul Scofield and Helen Mirren in 1988. They have been friends ever since.

Geoffrey is also an expert in true crime. The presenter of 28 episodes of his own one-hour television series Murder By The Sea for CBS Reality, he has also made more than 120 hours of television documentaries for Sky, The World’s Most Evil Killers and Britain’s Most Evil Killers, as well as many other crime documentaries for ITV, Channel Four and Channel Five.

His latest book, Pure Evil, about those British murderers given whole life sentences, is published in paperback by Penguin, and he was the authorised biographer of the Gloucester serial killer Frederick West, as well as the biographer of Levi Bellfield, the man who killed Surrey schoolgirl Milly Dowler.

Together with his daughter Molly, Geoffrey also has a weekly true crime podcast, Blood Ties, which has been running successfully for the past four years and is rapidly expanding its audience. Each episode deals with a specific crime, whether in Britain, America or around the world.

He has been the crime and thriller reviewer for the Daily Mail for the past decade, and before that was one of the paper’s leading feature writers. In a career spanning more than five decades in journalism he has also worked for The Times, The Observer and The Sunday Telegraph Magazine among many others.

Geoffrey’s biography of the playwright Terence Rattigan was short-listed for the Whitbread Book of the Year award, and was published in both Britain and the United States, as were his biographies of the British-born Hollywood star Cary Grant and James Goldsmith.

A life member of The Garrick Club in London, of which both he and David are Trustees, Geoffrey is also the Club’s official historian, and speaks regularly about the Club’s 190 year history and its many eminent members, including Charles Dickens, A. A. Milne, Noel Coward and Sir Laurence Olivier.

It was during the First World War that Agatha turned to writing detective stories. Her debut novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles took some time to finish and even longer to find a publisher. She started writing partly in response to a bet from her sister Madge that she couldn’t write a good detective story and partly to relieve the monotony of the dispensing work which she was now doing. (When the Hospital opened a dispensary, she accepted an offer to work there and completed the examination of the Society of Apothecaries.) She first worked out her plot and then “found” her characters on a tram in Torquay. She finished the manuscript during her two week holiday which she spent at the Moorland Hotel at Haytor on Dartmoor. Her new found expertise in poisons was also put to good use. The murderer’s use of poison was so well described that when the book was eventually published Agatha received an unprecedented honour for a writer of fiction – a review in the Pharmaceutical Journal.

1919 was a momentous year for Agatha. With the end of the war, Archie had found a job in the City and they had just enough money to rent and furnish a flat in London. Later that year, on the 5th August, Agatha gave birth to their only daughter, Rosalind. It was also the year that a publisher, John Lane of The Bodley Head, and the fourth to have received the manuscript, accepted The Mysterious Affair at Styles for publication and contracted Agatha to produce five more books. John Lane insisted on a couple of changes to her manuscript including a reworked final chapter – instead of a courtroom climax, Lane proposed the now familiar denouement in the library.

So where did the inspiration for Hercule Poirot come from? During the First World War there were Belgian refugees in most parts of the English countryside, Torquay being no exception. Although he was not based on any particular person, Agatha thought that a Belgian refugee, a former great Belgian policeman, would make an excellent detective for The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Hercule Poirot was born.

Following the war Agatha continued to write – experimenting with different types of thriller and murder mystery stories, creating first Tommy and Tuppence and then Miss Marple in quick succession. In 1922, leaving Rosalind with her nurse and her mother, she and Archie travelled across the then British Empire, promoting The Empire Exhibition of 1924. She continued to write: Agatha received the joyous news of good reviews for The Secret Adversary while in Cape Town (where she also became the first British woman to surf standing up) and Archie’s boss proved the inspiration for Sir Eustace Pedlar in The Man in the Brown Suit, also set in Africa. By this time Christie had already decided to change publishers. Fed up with what she saw as the unfair terms offered by The Bodley Head, she sought out an agent, Edmund Cork, of Hughes Massie and he found her a new publisher – William Collins and Sons (now HarperCollins).